first item, I would rather once the choice is made, a graphic screen comes up rather than all the text scroll by during boot. The graphic screen does come up after I press enter to clear the pause / error

The text goes by so fast, I tried <ctrl><break> but no luck. I wonder if there is a script I can change to > the text to a file ?

I did not copy the exact wording... basically it comes to a stop (the boot) and says the boot drive is read/write and should be set to read only. Press [enter] to continue - and from there on it goes to the graphic screen and boots properly to the desktop.

still on the screen just before coldplugging I notice at the top of my screenstarting sysfssysfs on /sys type sysfs(rw)starting udevd:coldplugging

from the same lilo boot menu, this does not happen with xandros 4 or Mint (or Windows)

situation still the same this is the lilo I just booted with, on hda7 Xandros /ectI wonder if it is chaining to another lilo on hda5 /etc ?looking....there is on hda5 , but it has ro and read-only in it

Did you install a lilo configuration on the first sector of the VL partition? If so, then yes, it's chaining from the one on the MBR to the other on the partition. If you're using a bootloader from another distro you want to skip lilo installation when you install VL.

Here is my /etc/lilo.conf, installed by VL 6.0, which does work as you'd want it to:

no luck, I did see a spot where I had ro and rw in the append line, removed the rwadded your append = "splash=silent resume=/dev/hda5" to my lilo on hda7

My next thought is re_install Mint and allow it to install GRUB.... maybe that will do the trick. Mint works well, I guess its not that big a deal to do a clean install and try grub. TO EVERYONE that has read this thread...

VECTOR WORKS BETTER ! Better as in has a couple features I prefer over Mint AND is FASTER.

My case is unusual, most people will have just Vector, or Vector and Windows and will not run into this problem. It is not even a problem really, it is just something that bugs me, text and a pause error on boot.

With Grub installed, you do not need the Vector-installed Lilo at all. I migrated to Grub several years ago, since I could not work out any easy way of making Lilo boot multiple distros (I know it can be done, but it has always been a pain when I've tried it).

At present, I have Windows (Vista, unfortunately), Zenwalk 6.0, Vector 6.0, Vector 5.9 and a (currently badly broken) Zenwalk snapshot on the machine. I use the Vista boot loader as the primary boot selector, with a choice of Windows or Linux. When I select Linux, it passes control to a copy of Grub installed to the root of the partition that I use as /boot for Zenwalk 6.0. From there, I use Grub to select whichever distro I want to use.

My entry for Vector 6.0 is as below (the drive in the laptop is SATA, so all partition designations for Linux are sd?):

The initrd combined with 'splash=silent' should give you a splash screen during boot (doesn't work for me, since VGA=870 sets the screen resolution to 1280x800 for the widescreen laptop and breaks the splash screen - one day I'll get round to making a set of 1280x800 splash screens, but not today....)

Done that way, I only ever install Grub once. It will boot all the copies of Linux that I want, so I always try to skip the install of a boot loader for each distro that I install. Fortunately, Vector allows me to select not to install Lilo - some other distros are less obliging.

You should be able to modify the Grub menu.lst to take care of both starting Vector and providing you with the boot splash screen on startup.